Smart Design with a minimal Number

The conceptual modeling language Object-Process Methodology (OPM), developed by Technion Professor Dov Dori, has been adopted and published by ISO as ISO 19450.

Prof. Dov Dori

Prof. Dov Dori

Many scientific and technological advancements start as a sketch on a napkin. In the past, inventors continued developing this sketch to get a full-fledged design. Nowadays, engineering design of complex systems, products, and services takes place in the digital sphere and integrates a variety of hardware, software, humans, and regulations. Therefore, there is a growing need for a comprehensive, holistic conceptual design, whose objective is to specify the exact architecture – the structure and behavior of the system – such that it would deliver the expected benefit. To achieve this goal, a growing number of organizations are adopting a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) approach as an initial lifecycle stage, during which a conceptual model of the system, product, or service is created in a formal graphical language.

Over the past two decades, Prof. Dov Dori of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion has been developing Object-Process Methodology (OPM) as a language and method for conceptual modeling of complex systems of any kind, be it artificial or natural. An OPM model expresses both graphically and textually the architecture of the system: Interconnected diagrams at varying levels of detail, from a bird’s eye view to any desired number of “nuts and bolts” views, specify any conceptual and logical aspect of the system. Each graphic expression is translated on the fly to a corresponding textual specification in a plain subset of English. Thanks to its simplicity, OPM serves as a common language for all the system’s stakeholders, who can take part in creating the model from the very early requirements engineering phase. At any stage, the model can be visually simulated to examine the system’s operation and verify that it behaves as expected on its way to becoming an actual product or service.

OPM has been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, and on December 7, 2015 it was published as a normative ISO 19450 document at https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:pas:19450:ed-1:v1:en. Approval of this standard, which is the first of its kind to be adopted by ISO, marked the end of a six-year effort by a working group under the auspices of ISO Technical Committee TC184/Sub-Committee SC5, led by Mr. Richard Martin, with active participation of Prof. Dov Dori, Mr. David Shorter, and Dr. Alex Blekhman, whose PhD dissertation under Prof. Dori’s guidance was an offspring this endeavour. The work to prepare ISO 19450 included yearly meetings at various locations around the world, including Tokyo, Paris, Tampa (FL), and Haifa, at the Technion. Even before its official publication, OPM is already being used in newly developed ISO standards, serving as a basis for the new generation of standards, which will be model-based, rather than text-based, enabling their systematic review for completeness and integrity.

A basic premise underlying OPM is that one can build a model of any system in any domain and at any level of complexity with the most minimal set of building blocks: stateful objects (objects with states) and processes that create or consume objects, or change their states. Over the last decade, Technion students at the Enterprise Systems Modeling Laboratory developed OPCAT (Object-Process CASE Tool)—a software package that is available freely from the Lab’s website http://esml.iem.technion.ac.il/ and translates the user’s graphic input into simple English in real time. This enables quick model development jointly by the customer and the system architects and engineers, and reliable verification of the model as it is being created.